Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyoko Kagawa, and Takashi Shimura
Region: B
Label: BFI
***Pre-order for release on 20 January 2025.
Payment taken at checkout, order shipped closer to release date. If your order contains this title (or other pre-orders) then please note all orders are shipped out in one go, once all titles are available (we don't part-ship)***
HIGH AND LOW (1963) directed by Akira Kurosawa, iis a gripping police thriller starring Toshiro Mifune and based on an Ed McBain novel.
Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (Mifune) faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur’s boy by mistake – but still demands the ransom, leaving Gondo facing ruin if he pays up.
An anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society,HIGH AND LOWis a complex film noir, where the intense police hunt for the kidnapper is accompanied by penetrating insight into the kidnapper’s state of mind. Kurosawa’s virtuoso direction provides no easy answers, and in short, the police and the criminal as equally brutal, but nonetheless human.
Newly recorded audio commentary by Japanese film expert Jasper Sharp
Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create – High and Low (2002, 38 mins): the director discusses how High and Low came to exist, and how specific sequences were filmed. Also features interviews with actors Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyoko Kagawa, Takeshi Kato, and Tatsuya Mihashi, as well as cameraman Takao Saito and Masaharu Ueda and script supervisor Teruyo Nogami
**FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Illustrated booklet with new essay on the film by Alex Barrett, archive essay by Philip Kemp and an original review from Monthly Film Bulletin
